70 Murders, Yet Close to Going Free in Pakistan

Fear prevents many Pakistanis from confronting militants in court. Fida Hussein Ghalvi testified against one such suspect and has paid for his courage since. Credit
Michael Kamber for The New York Times

MULTAN, Pakistan — It has been 12 years since Fida Hussein Ghalvi testified against the militant who was charged with killing 12 members of his family. But some days he feels as if he were the one who ended up in jail. He still gets threats, his servants all quit and an armed guard is posted at his gate.

Most maddening is the fact that the militant — Malik Ishaq, one of the founders of the country’s most vicious sectarian group, whose police record has a dizzying tally of at least 70 murders — has never had a conviction that stuck.

In Pakistan, the weakness of the state is matched only by the strength of its criminals. When Mr. Ishaq was arrested in 1997, he unleashed his broad network against his opponents, killing witnesses, threatening judges and intimidating the police, leading nearly all of the prosecutions against him to collapse eventually.

Now, with the cases against him mostly exhausted, Mr. Ishaq, 50, jihadi hero and leader of the militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, could be out on bail as early as this month. That prospect terrifies Mr. Ghalvi, whose world has shrunk to the size of his house in this central Pakistani city.

Punishing criminals is a slippery business in Pakistan, where years of military rule have badly weakened the country’s civilian institutions, like its police force. Its criminal code dates from the 1860s. There are no modern-day forensics, shifting the burden onto witnesses, who, without a functioning protection program, routinely refuse to appear.

What is more, the country’s intelligence agencies have a long history of nurturing militants as proxy forces over the heads of the police. Few civilian victims, judges or even police officials dare to buck what Pakistanis take for granted as an untouchable network of support.

Mr. Ishaq is no exception. Pakistan’s spy agency, hedging against the Shiite revolution in neighboring Iran and in favor of the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, began pouring money into hard-line Sunni groups like his in the 1980s.

These days, Mr. Ishaq, a cigarette dealer with a sixth-grade education who has been in jail since 1997 with 44 cases against him, no longer seems to have official support, police officers said. Even so, convicting him has been all but impossible.

One of the main reasons is fear. Beginning in 1997, Mr. Ishaq stood trial in the deaths of 12 people at a gathering of the Ghalvi family, who are Shiites. Soon after the trial began, witnesses began to die. Mr. Ghalvi’s older brother was shot to death in his general store. A cousin was gunned down on his way to work.

Intimidation of witnesses became a more effective tool after 1990, when an Islamic provision known as “blood money” was passed that allowed criminals to settle their crimes with victims’ families outside court. According to Tahir Wasti, a former legal adviser to the Punjab provincial government, it gave a frightened family even greater incentive not to go through the pain of a prosecution.

The law, set in motion by the 1980s military dictatorZia ul-Haq, caused the number of canceled cases in districts in and around Multan to double between 1981 and 2000, according to Mr. Wasti. Only 3 percent of murder cases in the area end in convictions, he said, a fraction of the rate in the United States.

“The provision has shaken the whole criminal justice system,” said Mr. Wasti, who has written a book on the subject. “It has encouraged all the criminals of Pakistan. They have used this loophole to kill whoever they want.”

Through eight more deaths and eight years of court proceedings, the Ghalvis refused to compromise, but to their bitter disappointment, a judge ruled in 2004 that there was not enough evidence to convict. The case has been in an appeals court ever since.

The reason for the acquittal is unclear, but it is possible that outmoded police work was at fault. Pakistan does not have a single up-to-date forensics lab, and the tools of modern-day policing — fingerprints, DNA samples — are not available here.

The police are corrupt, asking for money to pursue cases and fulfilling illegal orders from higher-ups to make deals with criminals. Intelligence agencies also interfere by seizing a militant, taking him out of circulation for months and then dumping him on the police when his crime is long cold.

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Only 3 percent of Multan-area murders end in convictions.Credit
The New York Times

But there are honest officers, and one who qualifies, in Mr. Ghalvi’s opinion, is Ijaz Shafi, a police investigator who worked on another case against Mr. Ishaq. Officer Shafi, who is Sunni, was angered at the sectarian killings that were sweeping Pakistan in the 1990s, sometimes 100 a day.

“A doctor was killed while sitting in his clinic just because he was Shiite,” said Officer Shafi, whose booming voice and dramatic manner give him the air of an Italian film director. “I thought, ‘This is not right. We should fight this.’ ”

He took up one of the more spectacular cases against Mr. Ishaq, a plot in which eight people were killed in an Iranian culture center in Multan in 1997.

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It took Officer Shafi three months to persuade a telephone line repairman to testify as a witness. He coaxed a handwriting expert into court. He got another to testify by arranging a visa to Malaysia for him.

Meanwhile, gunmen sprayed 13 bullets into Officer Shafi’s car. Threatening phone calls became so frequent that his wife began telling the callers to phone the police station.

His hard work paid off: A judge handed down a guilty verdict. But then, in the most disappointing moment of his career, the Supreme Court overturned it.

“It was fear,” said the judge who issued the initial verdict, explaining the Supreme Court decision. “It’s as obvious as daylight.”

The judge, who has tried more than 90 terrorism cases and used to use 16 different license plates to avoid being followed, had to be moved abroad after the trial, but now is back in Pakistan. He agreed to speak on the condition that his name would not be used. His guilty verdicts were overturned so frequently, he said, that he once met a man whom he had sentenced to death who was instead working as a ticket collector on a bus.

“The criminal justice system is almost completely broken,” the judge said, explaining that Mr. Ishaq had even confessed before him to the deaths at the Iranian center, but that under Pakistani law, only written confessions can be used as evidence. “A revolution will be required to fix it.”

That deficiency is particularly crippling in light of Pakistan’s insurgency, which the country’s military is fighting with blunt tactics that lack the needed precision an effective police force could provide.

“You need to be able to penetrate these groups and build cases,” said Samina Ahmed, director of the International Crisis Group in Pakistan. “You can’t do this with helicopter gunships.”

But for years the police have been sidelined, understaffed and underpaid. Just 50,000 officers cover all of the North-West Frontier Province, an area twice the size of Switzerland, where militancy is strong. In contrast, there are 35,000 for New York City alone.

The United States has not helped. According to Christine Fair, an expert with the RAND Corporation, little more than 2 percent of United States financing to Pakistan has gone to assisting the police from 2002 to 2008.

The problem is likely to get worse. Militant groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi are now entwined with the Taliban, Al Qaeda and criminal gangs with international ambitions. It is precisely this mix of violent crime and religious rhetoric that has made the insurgency so poisonous, Ms. Ahmed argues.

Fair trials of jihadis who have committed violent crimes are the only way to expose them. “It strips away that veil of ideology,” she said, “and leaves behind that naked face of a criminal.”

But such trials are rare, leaving people like Mr. Ghalvi, who dare stand up to militants, living in a strange state of suspended animation. He waits anxiously for his appeal. His cotton fields have declined. He no longer goes outside to buy his own clothes.

Even in prison, Mr. Ishaq could reach him. When Mr. Ghalvi’s loan extension was denied, a friend working at the bank confided that the manager had been approached by Mr. Ishaq’s compatriots.

Last month a friend made a painful discovery: posters on a city wall here congratulating Mr. Ishaq on his imminent release.

“I sometimes feel like a prisoner, and the killers are at large,” Mr. Ghalvi said, sitting in his large living room, dark from no electricity. “Where is the justice?”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 70 Murders, Yet Close to Going Free in Pakistan. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe